Mount Eerie – Night Palace


Nine years ago, Phil Elverum gave up on metaphors and mystery, focused only on the situation immediately in front of him. While his late wife Geneviève was in the hospital, undergoing treatment for cancer, he wrote up a new directive for his music. “No reverb. Close and direct,” it read in part. “Say everything as it is. No metaphors. Resist big-picture reflections.” That accurately summarizes the raw and realist approach he took in writing and recording A Crow Looked at Me, his first Mount Eerie album after Geneviève’s death, and one of popular music’s most heartbreaking reflections of grief. In just the first song, “Real Death,” he wrestles with the pointlessness of trying to create anything when faced with such pain and emptiness: “It’s not for singing about/It’s not for making into art/When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb.”
The previous iteration of Mount Eerie, the one that embodied the Pacific Northwest supernaturalism of Twin Peaks and draped songs in either black metal darkness or playful Auto-Tune, felt like a distant melody in this new iteration of Elverum’s music. But a lot changed in a concentrated period of time. His next album Now Only came to life with a heavy thrum of distortion, and though his lyrical approach mostly still surveyed the here and now, it shifted slightly to the reality of how life goes on, and quiet, everyday moments with notable people, like having conversations with Father John Misty at a festival in Arizona. Elverum fell in love again, got married and then divorced shortly thereafter, a brief saga of two people finding solace in the aftermath of grief. And among the seemingly least likely turn of events thereafter was the return of his former project, The Microphones—whose name Elverum retired 20 years ago—for a live performance and subsequent album, The Microphones in 2020, a 40-minute-long composition that found Elverum looking back over his youth and in a long and circuitous conversation with the past.
Since reopening that door to the past, Elverum’s seemingly become more comfortable traversing through it, thematically and aesthetically, reinviting anew those mystical and wondrous elements of the music he made in years past while reaffirming who he is and how far he’s traveled. Night Palace, the first Mount Eerie album in five years, most closely aligns with his sprawling 2001 masterpiece The Glow Pt. 2. Through its 26-song, 81-minute sprawl, he finds himself newly drawn to a similar kind of mystical illumination—the lightning in the distance and the fire at his back.
Elverum’s invocations of natural imagery have been a constant throughout his career, in both literal and figurative terms, but here his coexistence with the natural world feels more spiritual. There’s a kind of zen-like harmony in his descriptions of washing dishes or sweeping the floor, but he likewise carries a heavier weight in his acknowledgement of the sum total of lived experiences, anxieties and things that can’t be left behind, as he sings against the gorgeous layers of guitars on “I Walk,” “I still carry it all/The livelihoods, the expectations/the cities of never stopping thoughts/So I just still walk.” Even when the specter of mortality remains looming on the horizon, he seems more accepting, even comfortable with the idea of realizing one’s own insignificance. Amid the imposing wall of distortion in the title opener, Elverum even expresses a kind of gratitude: “I’m in love with the last of the light/and however long I have left in life/(and so what if no one ever finds this notebook)”.
The overwhelming expanse of Night Palace gives Elverum ample room to explore myriad sounds and approaches that range from the playful—like the short noisecore freakout of “Swallowed Alive” to the trap beats and Big Lebowski reference in “I Spoke with a Fish”—to the austere, with the booming drums and open space of “Breaths.” But by and large these are some of Elverum’s most stunning compositions. A deep bassline and shimmer of guitar guide the early standout “Huge Fire,” while occasional clashes of guitar crash through the hypnotic and glitchy organ of “Myths Come True.” And the dense, dynamic “Co-Owner of Trees” has a drive and immediacy to it that’s commanding and powerful. But Elverum is still expert at using imperfections to his advantage, songs like “Wind & Fog” serving as a reminder that he’s one of the rare musicians that can make instances of clipping actually work in the service of the song.
While Night Palace covers new musical ground and arrives upon moments of wisdom that a younger self didn’t and couldn’t have arrived upon, the past is never far behind. References to earlier material abounds, like on “The Gleam Pt. 3,” revisiting its 2001 predecessor’s haunted melody, or turning one of A Crow Looked At Me’s most poignant moments into a more commonplace, even risible observation on “I Saw Another Bird”: “So what? I saw another raven/I actually see them all the time.” And on the lengthy spoken-word “Demolition,” he reckons with an earlier statement that he no longer recognizes as one that carries any truth, and the understanding of descending from an uglier chapter in America’s history: “I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep, then I dug down just barely and found cathedrals. Here: A long guest in someone else’s home.”
The title of Night Palace also shares its name with the Joanne Kyger poem pictured on the cover of A Crow Looked at Me, which opens, “The best thing about the past is that it’s over.” Elverum makes no effort to leave it all behind, however, building bridges to chapters in time that have seemingly long faded. He makes an effort to feel it all, to acknowledge his place in the bigger picture, its beauty and its mystery, and to even mourn and condemn the real horrors that so much effort is made to bury, as on “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” That Elverum reaches so far and so deep seems to necessitate an album of this magnitude, that big ideas call for a suitably big album. But Elverum remains humble in spite of it, in awe of what surrounds him, learning to find peace in the quiet moments, best captured by a moment in which he goes outside to relieve himself in “Blurred World,” and becomes absorbed by what surrounds him: “I’m just happily here in the dusk, myself just as blurry.”
Label: P.W. Elverum and Sun
Year: 2024
Similar Albums:
Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.

Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.